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San Diego County’s regional planning agency is lining up its public-relations contracts for the next five years — at an estimated cost of $40 million.

The San Diego Association of Governments is interviewing dozens of PR firms for the on-call marketing and communications work.

SANDAG is responsible for tens of billions in long-range transportation and other planning. The public outreach will bring greater involvement of the public, a “value-added,” according to spokesman Colleen Windsor. She downplayed the estimated costs listed on agency documents.

“If you look at, ‘Gosh, they are going to spend $40 million,’ I would be alarmed as well,” Windsor said. “I can tell you as sure as I am breathing air right now we will not spend $40 million. But we had to provide ourselves capacity because this would be a five-year contract for the firms.”

SANDAG has a $1.3 billion annual budget that largely comes from state and federal allocations and a voter-approved county sales tax for transportation projects.

The agency employs 10 in-house communications and marketing staffers, six of them on limited terms. The annual communications budget is $1.6 million handling over 60 current projects.

$60 million
4% (38)

$40 million
7% (58)

$20 million
7% (64)

$5 million
22% (194)

$0
60% (537)

891 total votes.

The agency solicited firms in December and has received 64 applications for project-specific task orders — 44 for contracts up to $900,000, 14 for contracts ranging from $250,000 to $4 million and six for contracts ranging from $1 million to $25 million.

The PR consultants would be asked to develop and implement a variety of marketing, communications, and public outreach efforts relating to highway, rail and transit projects throughout their various design, environmental, and construction phases.

Sara Kent, program director at Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation, was skeptical about the amount of money being proposed.

“To the extent SANDAG uses these outside resources to meaningfully engage the public, obtain feedback and inform their decisions, it could be useful,” said Kent, a board member at the Cleveland National Forest Foundation, which is in litigation with the agency over its long-range transit plan. “It seems an exorbitant amount of money compared to their reluctance to commit funds to drastically improve our light rail and bike transportation options — infrastructure San Diegans want.”

Marco Gonzalez, cofounder and managing partner of Coast Law Group, agreed that the devil was in the details.

“SANDAG has a long history of steering the public not just to be informed, but to be supportive of their projects and approvals without full information,” Gonzalez said.

What else $40 million could do

Cover more than three years of the $12.6 million city budget of Lemon Grove, population 25,000.

Government agencies have increasingly relied on outside public-relations firms to help spread their messages, adding a layer of outreach to their growing ranks of in-house communicators.

U-T Watchdog calculated that the Port of San Diego has spent about $2.3 million on 10 different public-affairs companies over four years — at least one at a rate of $595 per hour.

Transportation projects often carry a PR component, for such purposes as informing the public about road closures. But some of those have been reined in of late.